Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Status Reports

Website - Outstanding Developments (2017 - March)

My website has evolved over time, and some parts are more active than others. Some haven’t been looked at (by me) for years.

I have known of various problems for some time, and they have been queuing for development awaiting my time / enthusiasm.

My focus has always been content before form. However, it’s form that catches the eye. So, the site needs a makeover.

I’ve also used rather primitive HTML techniques – whatever’s simplest.

I have started to document my website and the site-generator. The results are currently in a password-protected area. The functional documentation is very rudimentary, but the technical documentation – in the form of the actual code with hyperlinks between routines, and links to the tables and queries used – is wonderful (even if I say so myself) – something Microsoft should have supplied.

Check (in use) that the optional "don't print" feature for specific footnotes doesn't print other footnotes further down the chain. Probably OK.

Add "Specific", "Contextual" & "General" Notes as an optional footer to all Notes. I think this is important – part of the difficulty in understanding some philosophers is knowing what their background assumptions are, as this influences what they take to be “obvious” or “a given”.

Allow the option to concatenate Notes in the Printed version (ie. linearly embed them essay-style), rather than treating the hyperlinks as footnotes – but still keep the hyperlink & cross-referencing in place. The difficulty here is the need for linking passages to make the text run smoothly.

Book Comments: if there are explicit internal links to files in Book Comments, they cannot work both in the BookSummary and BookPaperAbstracts, which are at different directory levels. So, don’t put them in the Comments – only in the Abstract.

Books by Location: the jump table led to an invalid location. I bodged the data, by deleting an unused location, and didn’t properly investigate.

Books to Notes: There’s an issue if a note changes from Secure to non-Secure, but I bodged the data and didn’t try to fix it.

Items Completed in 4Q16-1Q17

Created Master Point Lists & Promotions for the ECBA website.

Added new features (70s Club & Monthly Pairs Winners) to my Bridge mini-websites.

Items Completed in 2-3Q16

Developed a website for displaying the textual and grammatical analyses and appendices of Pete’s PhD on the Acts of the Apostles. It exists in two versions: Live (Acts: Live Site) and Test (Acts: Test Site).

Made a lot of progress on improving the hyperlinking in my own website – I’ve broken the back of this project. The links now work accurately, but I need to ensure the efficient propagation of linkage changes across the site without requiring a complete regeneration.

Development of the “Eve Goblets” (victor ludorum) software for the ECBA, and roll-over to the new season.

Items Completed in 1Q15

Further improvements to my Butler-IMPs and Cross-IMPs calculation routines. This work has been taken up by the ECBA for county-team selection.

Vastly improved the “bulleting” options in Notes, etc.

Improved the format and content of “Authors” pages.

Segregated time-recording so I can easily see how much time is spent developing and supporting my own website, and how much is spent on those of other organisations.

Took on the ECBA Website, at the cost of considerable effort, and also started a project to provide small websites for bridge clubs without sites.

Items Completed in 4Q14

Improvements to my Butler-IMPs and Cross-IMPs calculation routines – different formats, including the Jeff Smith format, and extension to Butler-scored Pairs events. This work has been taken up by the ECBA selectors for county-team selection.

Made improvements to the regeneration and referencing of archived Notes.

Fixed the bug wherein the Spider ran out of system resources on large runs: now compacts & repairs the slave database as it does along (every 200k links; parameterised).

Items Completed in 3Q14

Created a suite of programs to extract data and calculate Butler-IMPs and Cross-IMPs from the travellers on Bridgewebs Teams events, and output ranking-lists to the Web.

Continued working on my Spider and started to use it to clean up my website by diagnosing broken links.

Items Completed in 2Q14

Created multiple secure areas on my website, so that Documentation is no longer hiding under my Supervision Notes.

Created the facility for Author Narratives.

Added extra linkages between pages (eg. on Author).

Wrote routines to import old (but missing) archived Notes into the database so they can be (and have been) re-exported in the current format.

Used a clone of my Spider routines to create a backup and restore system.

Items Completed in 1Q14

Created a “Website Regeneration Dashboard” to show when the various elements of my website have been refreshed, and how long the routines took to run. Links to this appear in the footer to each webpage.

Improved the regeneration routines for the various classes of webpage, and got them to record statistics in support of the above.

Repaired / updated my Website site-map.

Made a lot of improvements to my Site generators, in particular the pesky bug that stopped the links to archived Notes working correctly.

Items Completed in 4Q13

None!

Items Completed in 3Q13

Enhancements to "Books & Papers Collection Categorised" Pages

"Single Image" development for Notes

Allowed "Authors Works Lists" to be linked-to from Notes

Created Archived Notes Re-Export facility

Converted Tables to CSS3 standard

Re-engineering Monthly Reporting on Change of Year

Re-engineered Time-Recording, so that actuals are held against Papers (and Books) in a separate table, rather than as columns by year in the Papers / Books tables themselves. Retained the grand totals only.